Re: Automatic clustering of languages

--- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "Richard Wordingham" <richard@...> wrote:

>
> --- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "mkelkar2003" <swatimkelkar@> wrote:
>
> > Yes, but the 'others' group splits into 'Dravidian' and then after
> > another split into Greek and Lithuanian/Lativian the, latter being
> > very close to Sanskrit.
>
> The 'others' group contains *all* the non-Indo-European languages in
> the study.

And also some key IE langauges like Greek, Iranian, and Lithuanian
(the most archaic of all IE languages?).

M. Kelkar

>
> I suspect that the Graeco-Baltic group is largely the group where
> masculine substantives have final -s in the nominative singular. The
> study comes close to isolating a Finno-Maori group. The latter is
> probably capturing a similarity between typical Finnish words and the
> typical Maori words. Remember that the metrics are quite crude, and
> they do not capture the notion of a regular sound change.

It would be

> fun to obtain the analysis program and see how sensitive the analysis
> was to minor changes in the presentation of the data. I don't have
> time to do it.
>
> Richard.
>